I believe my hard drive has suffered a flaming, burning death. It USED to be an internal drive, but it was always meant as a media drive and was never a main drive. Since I got a new computer I took out this drive and put it into one of those cases that turn an internal drive into an external one. It's connected via USB.

Now just yesterday I turn on my drive, and lo and behold, there's NO data on it. The BIOS recognizes the drive (which is good!), but it's in RAW format now (I believe it was a FAT32 drive before, and if I'm right I'm probably screwed right there) and says it's not formatted! WHAT! :( I had a couple of lock ups with it (which unplugging the drive and plugging it in helped) and I wasn't sure if it was a drive or USB problem. I backed up a bit just in case, but that was 3 months ago. It was working beautifully yesterday and I shut it down normally. But apparently not normally enough!

I think obviously saving the drive will not happen, but does anyone know of any good data recovery software? I figure this is probably a shot in the dark and all, but hey! Anything helps!

In the meanwhile I go back to restoring my lost media collection. Thankfully I had most of it backed up, but I still lost 20% of it. My anime! ;_; *sniff*

I think the cheapest version is the Lite one, but that only allows you to recover 25 files per session. I readily admit to getting a hold of my copy of the software by less, shall we say ethical?, means.

I think the cheapest version is the Lite one, but that only allows you to recover 25 files per session. I readily admit to getting a hold of my copy of the software by less, shall we say ethical?, means.

(cough cough yeah I would agree)

And I did some workarounds. Apparently one bad sector is the cause of my woes. I'm in the process now of trying to extract my old data (which, thank god, is still there) and then will reformat this poor old drive. I'll let you know how it goes. I'll probably celebrate by watching all the anime I saved from the firey jaws of hard drive death!

EDIT: It worked, it worked! I saved most of my data. Thank you so much for this suggestion -- you saved me assloads of money. May I buy you two gentlemen a drink?